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Night Speakers Wiki:General policy
This general policy is the main policy to ensure that the Night Speakers Wiki has the very best content and resources possible, we need to lay out a few policies to make sure editors have a clear idea of how to structure articles and make sure our pages are up to the very best of standards. There are very few policies which apply across all of the FANDOM network and these can be found at Community Central. An Overview Before you begin making lots of huge edits, we recommend you read these guidelines and rules to ensure we don't roll back all your hard work! We strive to make a free, only encyclopedia of all things to do with Night Speakers and its multiverse! Please respect this and don't add anything that has nothing to do with the ''Night Speakers'' series. All policies apply to all editors, no matter what role you have! The Night Speakers Wiki wants to create a welcoming and informative environment for all no matter what faith, culture, sexuality, gender or race. We wish for all our editors to be civil and assume good faith unless it is clear this is not the case. We wish for fans to have the ability to seek consensus in discussions and work towards our goal of making an encyclopedia about everything in the Night Speakers universe. The following bullet points are brief statements to remember: *The following rules are only to be broken if it benefits the whole wiki! *Ali Sparkes' words make up our wiki *This wiki should be able to be viewed freely by everyone of all ages *The wiki is not a social networking site Content This site is a wiki, an online encyclopedia about the Night Speakers series. We store information, facts, images and theories about Night Speakers as well as discussions and polls based on the books. We do not host fan content on the wiki or things unrelated to the main topic of the project, this includes fanon (fanfiction, fan drawings etc.), adverts and spam. Despite these rules, your profile and user namespace are your own to organise and make how you wish it to be however they must comply with the wiki's policies about no swearing or other adult themes. Your is your own place also however this feature allows users to communicate with you in accordance with our communication policy. As long as what you put is legal and follows our basic guidelines, it is allowed. Copyright All content displayed on the wiki (images, music etc.) must either in the public domain, other free use copyright statements or can be used with credit. Copyrighted content will be immediately removed, no matter how good it is. The only exception to this rule is when materials is classified as fair use in which case it must be clearly indicated. Facts, quotes, information, figures and other statistics can be taken from anywhere as long as it is sourced. All text must be original, do not copy from Wikipedia or other websites. Blocking Users who continually refuse to follow the rules stated on the wiki will be banned (after numerous warnings) by the discretion of any admin and their contributions rolled back. However, the Night Speakers Wiki hates blocking users from editing our site and use it as a last resort for those who repeatedly disrupt the use of it. Editing *We highly recommend you use FANDOM's on articles rather than the or any external HTML editors (like Microsoft Word). We believe that the VisualEditor is too restrictive and external editors may disrupt your code. It is always best to make sure your edits look clean and tidy rather than like a vandal's. Links All links must be in the short form: Vandalism If you see an act of vandalism, please revert the page to its original state and report on an admin's Message Wall! Users who commit vandalism will be blocked from editing the wiki for a small amount of time in order to refrain them from damaging the site. Vandalism is editing the wiki in a negative wiki with the vision to destroy the content available on the wiki and damage the wiki as a whole. Difficult to block or otherwise exceptional vandals will be reported to the VSTF. No copy policy Every article on this wiki must be written so that the information is clear and concise, complete and correct as well as being different to other text written on the internet. Some writers may be tempted to copy articles written on other sites which can lead to a lot of redlinks and incorrect, unsourced information which other users will have to clean up. If you see a page on this wiki which is a copy of another site's page then you can either rewrite and correct the page yourself or let an admin know on their Message Wall. Style of writing The following paragraphs contain details regarding how the information on this wiki should be formatted and laid out. "In-universe" point of view To make sure our articles are consistent, all pages based on people, places or objects that are located within the Night Speakers multiverse have to be written from an "in-universe" perspective rather than from one of the "real-world". For example, 'Matt Wheeler was one of the main characters in the Night Speakers series' should be changed to 'Matt Wheeler was a teenage boy from East Anglia'. This rule does not apply to subjects that are not located in the Night Speakers series, like Ali Sparkes or the books. Subjects that exist both in the real-world and in the universe should be written from an "in-universe" perspective. Tensing "In-universe" articles should always be written in the pat tense. This is to stop articles switching from present to past tense and vice versa. The only exception to this is for all articles in the "real-world" where the present tense should be used unless that past tense makes more sense. Spelling Seeing as the Night Speakers series is originally a British series, all spelling should be taken from the British edition. This means we use "colour" instead of "color" and "grey" instead of "gray". Article naming The naming of an article should abide with the following rules: * An article's title should contain the full first name (and last name if known) *An article's title should contain the last name used most commonly throughout the Night Speakers series, regardless of marriage or change of name *Titles are not to be used in an article's title **Titles include: Mr, Mrs, Lord (and derivatives) **The exception for this is a character who is only known by a single name, first or last, aside from their title. Article naming of other subjects will, wherever possible, abide by the following conditions: *The use of an article (a, an, the) in an article's title is only acceptable when it is a part of the name. WikiText Style *Headers should be in the form Header , not the form Header . This only applies to articles, image pages use Summary automatically and talk pages are free form and no changes should ever be made to header style. Other * Do not go adding last names to links unless you have a valid reason to do so (e.g. if full character name hasn't been used earlier in the article). Full names should not be abused to bypass redirects. Stubs If you don't know enough information on a topic, an article is way too small, or you know there's more, then mark it as a stub. To do so, just add this to the top of the content with two {'s followed by the word'stub' and two }'s. And people will know that it's a stub by looking at the stub category. You can also mark an incomplete section of an otherwise-complete article by using similar markup at the end of the section, two {'s the word 'stub' and '|section' followed by two }'s. Page moves and rewrites As with any Wiki article, please do not make drastic changes and rewrites without the consent of other editors. Exceptions can be made if the article is in obviously bad shape. Otherwise, use the comments on the article to discuss changes to articles. General editing ;Reference edits Do not make edits involving adding information without also adding references using the reference tags (e.g. ). Edits that have not been referenced can and will be reverted without fail, no matter how hard you have worked on the information you gathered. ;Use the edit summary When editing pages, try to fill in the "Summary" box above the Save/Preview buttons before saving, and make sure that you fill it in with something useful describing the edit you made and, if it's not obvious, why. For example, "fixed spelling error" or "added fun fact" or "reverted edits by 127.0.0.1" are all acceptable. Saying "made some changes" or just filling in the name of the page is not helpful, because it's information that we already have. Making your Summaries accurate and useful makes it vastly easier for the rest of us to keep track of Recent Changes and keeps everybody happy. ;Use the minor edit button If you're making a minor edit (e.g. fixing a spelling error or tweaking formatting), try to remember to check the "This is a minor edit" button below the Summary box before saving the page. Again, this will make things easier for the rest of us. ;Don't use conversational style This is an online cyclopedia. It should read like an encyclopedia, not like your diary. * Check your spelling and grammar. Don't use internet slang (ex. "How r u?" or "c u 2nite"). If you're not 100% sure about the way a word is spelled, type it into Google or Dictionary.com. If you know that you're not the strongest speller, compose your edits in a word processor or web browser which has spell-checking (Firefox 2 and derivatives such as Lolifox, and Opera when ASpell is installed all work). * Don't use "smileys" or "emoticons" in articles. * Don't "reply" to content others have posted. If you think a particular point warrants discussion, post on the article's comments. If you're 100% sure that something should be changed and don't think a discussion is necessary, just change it. Dialogue goes only on articles' comments. ;Don't sign your edits All contributions are appreciated, but if every user left their mark on every contribution they made, the wiki would be nothing but signatures. If you've made an edit that you're particularly proud of, the correct place to take credit is on your own user page. If you do not have a user account, we respect your anonymity, but your edits will remain anonymous, too. ;Sign forum posts If you make a post on a discussion page or in the forum, please sign it. This is as easy as typing ~~~~ at the end of your post. If you don't have a user account, you could also sign it with your name or nickname so everybody can tell who's who when reading long conversations. Even better, create an account anyway and use the signature method described. There really is no reason not to if you're going to stick around. And getting an account gives you benefits such as being able to upload images to contribute, move pages that need moving, and the community will let you make use of your own userspace. (Anon users generally don't get that because their userspace may be shared among a number of people) ;Use templates Templates are provided for several reasons; they ensure pages are consistent in appearance, properly categorised etc. For instance, don't make the mistake of attempting to mark pages for deletion by adding ordinary text saying "this page needs to be deleted"; the page won't be added to the "Candidates for deletion" category, and thus nobody but you will know that it needs to be deleted unless they happen upon it. Use the delete template (see below) instead. ;Date pages to be deleted Don't just add to a page which you think needs to be deleted; instead, add (note that that's five tildes, not four) to automatically sign the time at which the template was added. Do use the actual template, not a plain-text "equivalent." Category:Policies